Portrait of the artist as a young boy
by Vashtijoy
Summary: Various things Light learned between the ages of three and five. Oneshot.


The room is the headmaster's office, though Light doesn't know that. The purpose of the meeting is to test his intelligence and his abilities, though he doesn't know that either. There's a great deal people don't tell him, and just now, he's still young enough not to realise, to accept the world he lives in at face value. It's always been perfect, Light's world, but that's how it should be when you're five.

The chair is on the other side of the desk, sized for an adult; Light is lost in it. The examiner is one of those grown-ups who think they're good with children. "That's not your real hair, is it, Light-kun? It's a wig, right?"

Light is so shocked by the patronising, impertinent question that the flattery of the older-boy honorific almost passes him by. Of course Light's hair is his own; the teacher is laughing at him. And it's as if Light's done something wrong, disappointed his parents in some awful way: that same heavy lump settling into his stomach, and down in his throat. He knows, he _knows_ he's not supposed to be upset with grown-ups - or teachers, though he's not quite used to having those yet. So he nods earnestly, pale, floppy, not-a-wig hair tumbling into his face, and insists, "No, it's _mine_." His lower lip pouts only a little bit.

People always congratulate his mother on how perfectly behaved her son is, after all. He can't stand the thought of letting her down.

* * *

Honestly, Light teaches himself best. The reading happened on its own; he doesn't remember a time when he couldn't follow along with the kana on the page, when the kanji hadn't grabbed his attention and told him what they meant, with that pattern-matching eideticism that he doesn't realise everyone else can't share. And then there was the time it occurred to him that he could count to a hundred. He'd hooked tiny fingers into the mesh of the fireguard, the steel frame warm against his baby skin. _One, two, three... ten, twenty, thirty... ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred_. It had been easy. He'd known the numbers already; he'd just needed to lay them out in order, in a pattern. He'd been three.

Besides that, up until now, Sachiko has been his only teacher. She taught him the rudiments of chess and go - or at least, she taught him how to move and place the pieces. They play simple, easy games; Sachiko always wins, and it doesn't occur to Light to mind. It's just how the world is, and he's safe and secure in it.

Light prefers chess; the icy symmetry of the go stones bores him a little. The chessmen are all different shapes, carved and polished, painted and varnished. Some of them are horses, and Light has only seen horses on TV. He lays out the board over and over, checking the colour of the bottom-left-hand square each time, placing the pieces one by one, taking them off the board again and aligning them in neat little rows. He plays games with himself, scrambling from one side of the board to the other, trying to form the pieces into triangles and squares, to keep one side of the board from reaching the other, to make impenetrable walls that can't be crossed.

It's chess that first teaches him that your parents will lie to you.

Light has finally brought his queen out - he tends to try and play only with the pawns, rather than sending his more useful, prettier pieces into danger. And he'll send the queen out sooner than the knights; he watches the horses disappear behind enemy lines with a sinking sense of dismay, and that same little won't-cry pout. Sachiko's bishop is threatening one of Light's knights - which has nowhere to go either; there's a pawn positioned in just the right place to capture it anywhere he can move it to. Seeing him start to panic, Sachiko takes the opportunity to explain promotion. "If you get one of the pawns to the top of the board, Light, you can turn it into any other piece you like. Isn't that nice? Just say you want to change your pawn, all right?"

Disbelieving, Light stares at her. Instinctively, without words, he understands what she's getting at; she's talking about magic. About things that only happen in books and on TV; things he knows perfectly well don't happen in the real world. If he could articulate his carefully-not-offended disbelief in the face of his mother's smiling good nature, he might sum it up as _I might be four, but I'm not going to believe that just because you say so_. But she's his mother, and more than anything - more than the familiar shade of the grey sky through the window, more than the favourite picture books he's memorised front to back, more than his reading and his arithmetic and all the other things he knows other children his age can't manage - he knows his mother will never lie to him.

The knight is captured, and Light doesn't pout, because he's going to get it back. Progressing one of the small cluster of pawns Sachiko's left alone to the end of the board, he clasps his hands together, stares at it, all owlish, hopeful curiosity, and repeats the words she taught him. "I want to change my pawn." He _really_ wants to see some magic happen.

Nothing happens, of course. He says it again. Then again, louder, emphatic.

Light realises his misunderstanding at the moment his mother collapses into helpless laughter, and hugs him tightly. Rather than burst into sickened, sickening tears - partly because his mother is laughing at him, partly because he's noticed one of his frequent misunderstandings, partly because there's really no magic at all - he smiles, because he's in Sachiko's arms, and she's smiling and laughing, and it's her who shows him how to behave, how to feel, how to be. But afterwards, he's less happy that she always wins; he never quite forgives her.

* * *

Once the examiner is done with insulting Light's appearance, the questions are easy. Very easy; Light is overjoyed. He's done well - no, he's got it _all right_, and everyone will be delighted. He sits outside the office while his mother and the teacher talk, on a red plastic chair that's scaled to fit. Occasionally pupils walk past and stare at him: a boy not in uniform, with strange, foreign hair. Light smiles at them as if he's the centre of the world, and reads the posters on the noticeboard opposite over and over. They have furigana, of which he approves; a lot of the time Light ends up buried beneath his father's books and newspapers and journals, in dictionaries and telephone directories and textbooks. Encyclopaedias are a particular favourite; they have huge, colourful photographs and diagrams, and Light skips over any characters he doesn't know. His mother's romance novels are colour-coded - good for sorting and arranging, but never for reading.

Eventually Sachiko comes out, gives him a big, motherly smile, and takes his hand. Baby Sayu is with a sitter for this afternoon; Light has his mother all to himself. She takes him home via the park, and buys him ice cream, a tiny vanilla cone that he promptly buries his nose in. It's for doing so well, a very rare treat indeed; as a rule, the only sugar in the Yagami household is used for cooking, tea and coffee. When he's done, Sachiko fusses, produces a handkerchief - real cloth, not scratchy paper tissues - and cleans up Light's face with a practiced rub here and there, and some kindly murmured observations on how unpleasant it is for others to have to see such a dirty little boy. Light giggles his routine apology back to her, and she lets him run ahead a few metres. When he can't see her, the look on her face is worried and sad.

Later on, Light sits in the hallway, padding his favourite toy up and down the walls. It's a plush police helicopter with a smiling face; most children get bears or pandas, but not Soichiro Yagami's firstborn son. Light's father is busy; very, very, busy. Usually he comes home just as Light is going to bed, or later still. He's an invisible presence in the house, most of the time, like a god: his shadow warms the whole family. That evening he's home early, sitting in the living-room with Sachiko. They're drinking tea and talking about someone.

"He tested off the charts. The teacher said it was the highest score he'd ever seen, that school wouldn't challenge him. I didn't know what to say." The odd note in his mother's voice is one Light recognises; it's that careworn sound that she thinks she hides, the one that wobbles the ground beneath his feet.

"Sachiko, we've always known he was intelligent. We can arrange other things for him. We would have had to, anyway."

There's a pause, before his mother lowers her voice. "Are you sure he's not listening, dear?"

Adults never remember how sharp the ears of children are, and Light is listening, of course; he can't help but do so. He hears everything, like the way Soichiro reassures Sachiko, rather than dismissing her fears. "He's not listening. He's only five."

With an ugly, unpleasant feeling, Light finally understands that the person they're talking about is him. It scares him; it creeps and crawls around him like worms. Taking his helicopter in one hand, he scuttles upstairs to his room with a clatter of dull footsteps, missing out on the confession that makes Sachiko's voice crack: "I - I don't know if I can do this. What if it all goes wrong? It's such a horrible responsibility."

* * *

After that, Light's parents try him in a variety of classes. He's heard them describe it as "aptitude testing". but he doesn't know what aptitude means. So far, he's taken to everything they've given him - or almost everything; the piano lesson was not a success. Something about the tone of the thing had grated in his head, inexplicably _wrong_; the vibrations from the wooden box had shaken him badly. If his teeth had been anything other than perfect, he might have said it was tinfoil against a filling. Light is in tears by the time his mother returns, as shamed as if he's wet himself; he's never made to return. Music is clearly not one of his aptitudes, and there are so many things he easily excels at. Except after that, he has an aversion to music: a tendency to make himself scarce when his mother plays it. Upstairs in his room, he can sit with his books and his jigsaws, his games and his toys. It's quiet, and it's his own space, and there's nothing there to disjoint the rhythm he moves to, the patter of his thoughts. He resents the intrusion, childishly petulant, and wants nothing more to do with the stupid sounds that make him feel as if he's not himself.

No, the class he really takes to is his English class.

Sachiko doesn't quite want to leave him after the disaster with the piano teacher. The teacher's bow is lower than his mother's, and very, very careful. "I'll take care of him, Yagami-san, of course. Please return in half an hour."

The woman scares him: she's foreign, white, with hair a few shades darker than Light's own, and ghost eyes like the algae in the park pond. Her Japanese is clear enough, slow and simple in the patronising way adults often talk to him. She introduces herself as Kimura-sensei, and Light doesn't know enough, yet, to realise it probably isn't her real name. The characters she writes down are too painstaking, too clearly not her own; they look printed with woodblock, all the stroke angles geometrically precise.

Twice a week, the teacher reads him stories - the sort of infant's picture book he barely reads at home, but bilingual - and plays what seem like games, and very quickly, begins to speak to him exclusively in simple English. Light's tongue trips wildly over the unfamiliar syllables she has him repeat. She teaches him rhymes, and poems, and asks him questions. While it's frustrating, that he can't make the sounds the way she can, he enjoys the classes, the _idea_ of a different language. It's like learning a code; like being a spy. Like uncovering a secret.

* * *

Light was also three years old when he learned to write his name. Sachiko had spelled it out for him in hiragana, and underneath in kanji. She'd shown him the stroke order, and told him the meaning of the characters. Crayon in hand, he'd laboriously copied them, over and over and over. They'd been an unrecognisable scrawl, except for the Light-kanji, the four strokes which Light refused to acknowledge had any other meaning. It was special, his very own. He'd take that conviction into adulthood with him: a twinge of amusement every time the moon was mentioned.

_Light. Yagami Light. Night, god, moon. That's me, me me me_.

It became one of the things he did. Lying on his stomach with his paper and his crayons, he scribbled stars and moons - enough moons in his skies to give Jupiter a conniption - flowers and cars and things that might be people if you squinted at them right. And he wrote his name, over and over. It was the night-kanji that gave him the most trouble; the eight strokes were more complexity than his chubby fingers could deal with. They had enough trouble keeping his artwork on the paper and not on the floor.

The question he eventually asked his mother wasn't serious. It was the sort of thing he knew wasn't true, that was impossible; the sort of disingenuous inquiry he'd make just for the joy of seeing her smile. Copying out his three kanji over and over at the bottom of his picture - what was it, a dog? a camel? - he'd asked her "My name - can I be a god when I grow up?"

Sachiko had looked astonished - but then she'd smiled, and yes, laughed, as he'd known she would. "I think you can do anything you want when you're grown up, Light."

Light had nodded, childishly solemn, hair in his eyes as he wrote himself down over and over. "Maybe I'll be a helicopter instead."


End file.
